FlexRAID Wikihttp://wiki.flexraid.com
Rethinking storage data managementMon, 04 Dec 2017 12:35:56 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.3Tip: Installing specific Linux kernel versionhttp://wiki.flexraid.com/2017/12/03/tip-installing-specific-linux-kernel-version/
http://wiki.flexraid.com/2017/12/03/tip-installing-specific-linux-kernel-version/#respondMon, 04 Dec 2017 04:37:58 +0000http://wiki.flexraid.com/?p=2954 Full Article…
]]>In the case that you ever needed to install a specific Linux kernel version in order to run a particular release, here are some quick tips.Note: This will only apply to Ubuntu/Debian users as RHEL/CentOS users won’t ever have such a need.

However, you can choose to install the extras too in order to be complete.sudo apt-get install linux-image-<version>-generic linux-image-extra-<version>-generic linux-headers-<version> linux-headers-<version>-generic
E.g., sudo apt-get install linux-image-3.19.0-80-generic linux-image-extra-3.19.0-80-generic linux-headers-3.19.0-80 linux-headers-3.19.0-80-generic

]]>http://wiki.flexraid.com/2017/12/03/tip-installing-specific-linux-kernel-version/feed/0Tip: Hacking tRAID Host to load on unsupported kernelhttp://wiki.flexraid.com/2017/11/29/tip-hacking-traid-host-to-load-on-unsupported-kernel/
http://wiki.flexraid.com/2017/11/29/tip-hacking-traid-host-to-load-on-unsupported-kernel/#respondWed, 29 Nov 2017 19:24:24 +0000http://wiki.flexraid.com/?p=2942 Full Article…
]]>This tip is for advanced users only.
In order to run a stable supported installation, you must run tRAID on one of the supported kernel versions.
The tRAID host is compiled for specific kernel versions. See http://www.flexraid.com/download-try-buy-traid/#download-traid for the list of currently kernels.

We also recommend that you run tRAID on distributions that maintain a stable ABI (Application Binary Interface) such as RHEL/CentOS. Your data is important – and so, the stability of the ecosystem is a must.
This topic simply does not apply to users running RHEL/CentOS as they will never experience the issue being discussed here. Kudos for running true enterprise level distributions.

This topic is mainly for users on distributions that don’t maintain a stable ABI. Ubuntu/Debian are such OSes.
ABI changes aren’t even an issue when it comes to tRAID. The issue is with the inability of the affected OSes to detect proper compatibility. If the ABI changes in any part of the system, all drivers are affected regardless of whether the actual changes affects them or not.

On non-stable ABI distros, the drivers might load on 4.10.0-40-generic but might fail to load on 4.10.0-45-generic even though there is no actual code break.
The truth is, the parts where tRAID integrates into the kernel will simply never change between Patch Revisions or even Minor Revisions. However, affected OSes will change the version of their ABI regardless of what part might have changed during update releases. Once such change happens, the OS blindly refuses to load drivers with a mismatched ABI version (vermagic).

All in all, it is fairly safe to force load the tRAID drivers on differing Patch Revisions. That is, if a release of tRAID says it supports 4.10.0-XX-generic it will indeed work on any 4.10.0-XX-generic kernel (where XX is any value).

In order to force load the tRAID drivers on an affected system (if you truly cannot stick to a supported revisions), follow these steps:

Stop the tRAID host service if it is running: sudo service traidhost stop

Copy the tRAID drivers (frouter.ko and NZFSK.ko) from /opt/traid/host (or wherever you have the host installed) to /lib/modules/$(uname -r)

Run sudo depmod -a

Run sudo modprobe -f frouter.ko (must be loaded first)

Run sudo modprobe -f NZFSK.ko

Start the tRAID host service: sudo service traidhost start

Tip: you can automated the forced loading of the drivers on boot by creating a shell script file named insmod.sh and placing it in the tRAID host installation folder. Ensure that the shell script file is executable. The content of that file will simply be the modprobe commands.
Future releases will include a shell script file named custom.sh where users will be able to script custom startup executions.

]]>http://wiki.flexraid.com/2017/11/29/tip-hacking-traid-host-to-load-on-unsupported-kernel/feed/0FlexRAID RAID-F on OpenMediaVaulthttp://wiki.flexraid.com/2017/11/28/flexraid-raid-f-on-openmediavault/
http://wiki.flexraid.com/2017/11/28/flexraid-raid-f-on-openmediavault/#respondWed, 29 Nov 2017 02:59:36 +0000http://wiki.flexraid.com/?p=2924 Full Article…
]]>OpenMediaVault (OMV) is a great FreeNAS like NAS stack. While FreeNAS is based on FreeBSD, OMV is Debian Linux based, which makes it far more flexible and extensible.
FlexRAID RAID-F works on all Linux distributions with kernel 2.6 or newer. As such OMV is supported.

This article tackles the setup specific aspects of RAID-F on OMV.

1. Create all volumes on all disks to be used in RAID-F.
In OMV, go to Storage -> File Systems, and then click on the “Create” button.

2. Make sure to label your volumes to be created.
Adding meaningful labels to your volumes will aide in identifying properly the volumes through OMV, FlexRAID, and the OS system.

3. Ensure that all your intended DRUs and PPUs are properly identifiable in the OMV UI.

6. Restart the FlexRAID RAID-F service if it was already installed
In the case that FlexRAID RAID-F was already installed before you created new volumes through OMV, you might need to restart the FlexRAID service for the new volumes to be picked up.
Otherwise, please skip this step.
To restart the service, you can either reboot the system or preferably SSH into your installation and execute: sudo service raidf restart

7. In the RAID-F UI, refresh the Drive Manager for the newly created volumes to be usable.

8. Verify that all desired volumes are detected by the RAID-F Drive Manager

9. Configure your RAID as per the RAID-F guides on this wiki site.
One such guide is (ignore Windows specific topics): http://wiki.flexraid.com/guides/getting-started-guide/
After you have configured your RAID and initialized it, you are now ready to start the Storage Pool.

10. Start the Storage Pool.

11. Pool mounted to /media/FlexRAID_POOL
Once mounted, you will find your Storage Pool mounted on /media/FlexRAID_POOL.

Finally, please open a feature request with the developer of OMV to allow uses to create shares on a FlexRAID Storage Pool volume. Currently the OMV UI is not offering the FlexRAID Storage Pool volume as a target for OMV managed shares.

]]>http://wiki.flexraid.com/2017/11/28/flexraid-raid-f-on-openmediavault/feed/0Dynamic Translation of FlexRAID Web UIshttp://wiki.flexraid.com/2015/11/09/dynamic-translation-of-flexraid-web-uis/
http://wiki.flexraid.com/2015/11/09/dynamic-translation-of-flexraid-web-uis/#respondMon, 09 Nov 2015 12:38:01 +0000http://wiki.flexraid.com/?p=2901 Full Article…
]]>Releases of FlexRAID products starting 2015-11-09 will now support dynamic translations. This is useful for users working on translating the Web UIs.
By default and for performance reasons, translations for FlexRAID Web UIs are statically compiled into the application. This means that a full release is normally required to include translation changes.

All releases starting 2015-11-09 now include a translate directory, which further includes a file named translation.disabled.txt.
To enable dynamic translation, rename translation.disabled.txt to translation.enabled.txt and restart the Web UI service. After this change, translation content will be picked up from the translate directory and processed dynamically. Note that changes to the translation files require a restart of the Web UI service to in order to be picked up.

2. Locate the downloaded files

3. Extract the Host package to wherever you would like it installed. For this Windows installation, we extract it to C:\.

4. Navigate to the extracted folder, right-click on the install script, and choose to run it as Administrator.

5. Install the Web UI by double clicking on its installation package and following the wizard.

6. If you have not rebooted after installing the Host package, reboot your computer.

7. Open the Web UI through the desktop shortcut or by opening your browser to: http://localhost:8080. Login using admin/admin.

8. When prompted to add a host to manage, accept the default values or edit as appropriate.

9. After adding a host, you will be prompted to activate it if not yet activated.

10. After activation, the Express tRAID Configuration wizard should open.

11. Please prepare your disks as instructed.

12. Optionally, you can configure a Landing Disk for your Storage Pool.

13. Select the disks to include in your RAID array. Based on disks preparation, the UI will detect which disks you intend to use as data disks and which you intend to use as parity disks.

14. Review the final options and click “Finish”.

15. The wizard will create a configuration, which will be ready for initialization. You should think of changing the disk labels for the registered disks to something that will help you with their identifications.

16. Click to start the array. You will be prompted to initialize. Choose to initialize.

17. If you wish to have immediate access to your data, choose to initialize by doing nothing. This will delay parity computation to a later time of your choosing.

18. Your array will either start successfully or you might be prompted to reboot.

19. With the array and Storage Pool both started, you can now access you data through the Storage Pool. Please, run the Verify & Sync task if the array was initialized by doing nothing. Enjoy!

Transparent RAID on Linux follows the same approach as Transparent RAID on Windows. The engine, service brokerage, and task facilities are effectively the same. In fact, more than 80% of the code base is shared between the implementations with less than 20% being platform specific code. The core differences are in the system configurations and kernel integration. From an end-user perspective though, the differences will be minimal if not absolutely trivial.

Since Transparent RAID on Windows is fairly well documented, it is a better strategy to have an ultimate guide to detail of the specific of the Linux port.

*Support for additional distributions might be added later based on the number of requests for a given distro.*The Web UI can be installed on a 32 bit or 64 bit system. Only the host needs to be installed on a 64 bit system.**Non-LTS releases with kernel matching supported LTS releases will also work, but not recommended.

For those wishing to boot from a USB thumb drive, the following guides might be of use:

The installation manager simplifies the installation, service configuration, and update of your installation of Transparent RAID and its dependencies.
Both the Web UI and Host packages will be installed as services, which will auto start on system reboot.
Further, the services can be started, stopped, and restarted by running (*):

sudo service traid [start | starthost | startclient]

sudo service traid [stop | stophost | stopclient]

sudo service traid [restart | restarthost | restartclient]

*The kernel tRAID engine is unaffected by these operations, which means that it is okay to update/uninstall while the array is online.
Furthermore, you must reboot after updating the host for the changes to take effect in the kernel.

If you do not wish to use the installation manager, follow this section to do a custom installation of the Web UI client package.
Although the Web UI is compiled and available to be installed on each platform (Windows and Linux), only one install is needed to manage any number of hosts and regardless of the platform the host is running on. That is, the Web UI installed on either Windows or Linux can manage both Windows and Linux hosts. As such, the host can be running on one platform and the Web UI can be running on another platform. Obviously, for users with a single host, the Web UI service would be installed along side of the host services for simplicity.

Installing the Web UI on Linux:
The Web UI package for Linux is a 32 bit installation. On a 64 bit system, some dependencies need to be installed before the installation of the Web UI as shown below.

Notes to Ubuntu users:
If running into issues installing the Web Client with an error that reads “NZFS-TRAID-CLIENT-1.0_final_XXX.bin not found”, this means that you have unresolved dependencies that only aptitude can resolve.
Please follow the steps below to resolve that issue.

Run:
1. sudo apt-get install aptitude
2. sudo aptitude install libc6:i386 libncurses5:i386 libstdc++6:i386
3. When prompted to leave the installations unchanged, select no by typing “n”.
4. When then prompted to downgrade the presented modules, select yes by typing “y”
5. Run the Transparent RAID installation manager and choose to uninstall the Web UI
6. Run the Trasparent RAID installation manager again, but this time choose to install the Web UI

If you do not wish to use the installation manager, follow this section to do a custom installation of the host package.
Transparent RAID for Linux does not require installation or uninstallation as it comes in a portable package. Installing is as easy as extracting the zip package to any directory and starting the service broker from there. Similarly, uninstalling is as easy as deleting the extracted folder. There are no configuration files, and the service broker takes care of all system configurations, which are all dynamic. The service broker also loads and unloads the drivers on demand, and the drivers clean up after themselves when unloaded such as to leave no trace of their presence.
This portability means that the host package can be added to a Live CD or placed on a thumb drive or integrated in a truly flexible fashion.

Preparing all disks to be used as DRUs (data disks)

Do not use your OS’s default Disk Manager!

It is highly recommended that the Linux OS’s default Disk Manager NOT be used for formatting and partitioning disks. Instead use gparted. This is because on most Linux distributions, the default Disk Manager uses fdisk for the tasks, and fdisk does not properly support GPT disks. The GPT partition format is required for disks larger than 2TB. Even if your disks are MBR formatted, it is simply better to use gparted as it is the better tool.
If gparted is not installed on your system, please install it by issuing at a shell prompt: sudo apt-get install gparted.
Using a wrongly formatted GPT disk is not just an issue for tRAID usage, it is an issue period and even when tRAID is not involved.

Formatting or verifying the formatting of an existing disk

Transparent RAID supports disks with existing data on them. There is no data migration required. However, the proper partition alignment for the existing disks must be verified to conform.
In all cases:

The first partition on the disk must be at the 2048 sectors (1 MB) or greater offset

There must be at least 1 MB left free at the end of the disk (8 MB recommended)

Using the GPT patitioning format for all disks larger than 2TB (GPT and MBR are both fine for disks 2TB or under)

If any of your data disks does not conform to the above requirements, you will need to backup the data off that disk, erase and properly partition the disk as required above, and finally copy back the data on the disk.

All DRUs (data disks) must be formatted with at least one partition on them. Also, do label your partitions for easy identification later.
All PPUs (parity disks) must be unformatted an must NOT have any partition on them, but should be initialized with a partition table (GPT or MBR).
All this is technically not required as you could later format the disks through the transparent disks tRAID presents you, but the Web UI enforces this requirement in order to help users differentiate between their data disks and disks to be used as parity disks.

As previously mentioned, you can verify the partition alignment of existing disks in gparted.
You should also format new disks using gparted as shown below.

Formatting and partitioning are two separate actions. You can view the formatting of your disk (whether it is GPT or MBR) by selecting View -> Device Information in gparted.
To view the information on an existing partition, go to Partition -> Information.In particular, ensure that your partitions are labeled!

If the disk is unformatted, you can format it by going through Device -> Create partition table.
To create a new partition, select Partition -> New.Please label all partitions for easy reference later!

After, you have verified or formatted and partitioned all of your DRUs and deleted all partitions off your PPUs, you should verify that your DRUs partitions are labeled, mountable, and accessible as desired. Verify that you can read/write from/to each volume.

Important: Do not mount your partitions in fstab! All mounts should be temporary.

The service broker manages everything on the host. It dynamically manages the kernel drivers and takes care of all system configurations.
So, starting the service broker starts up everything else as required.The service broker must be started as root user! It requires elevated privileges to perform many of its tasks.

If you used the installation manager, both the service broker and UI service will automatically start on boot.
To manually start them, run: sudo service traid start. This single command will start them both as needed.
If you did a custom installation, you can manually start the service broker through the shell by changing to the executable’s directory and issuing: ./NZFSB &
Similarly, you can manually start a custom Web UI installation by changing to its installation directory and issuing: ./nzfsui &

The preferred way to configure an array is through the Express Wizard.
You can open the Express Wizard by right-clicking on the host node in the Web UI or by right-clicking on the “RAID Configurations” node and selecting the Express Wizard.TODO: Document Express Wizard on Linux as done for the Windows platform here: http://wiki.flexraid.com/2014/07/27/transparent-raid-quick-setup-guide/

In fact, virtually everything else in the configuration and RAID management process is the same as done in Windows.
So, do follow the tutorial trail while ignoring all Windows specific comments: http://wiki.flexraid.com/category/traid/

Changes to your system

The thing you will notice when you create and initialize your array is that all of the data partitions for the disks included in the RAID will go missing from your system. This is normal. These partitions will be added under the tRAID disks to be created when the array is brought online.

7. After the installation completes, you must reboot the system. If you intend to install the Web Client Package on the same system, you can install the client package prior to rebooting. However, remember to reboot the system prior to launching the Web Client.

Pre-requisite

Overview

The Transparent RAID client package should be installed on only one system per a given network.
If managing only one host, you should install the client package on the host being managed. Alternatively, you can choose to install the client package on another system.
If managing multiple hosts, it is recommended that you only install the client package on only one of the hosts or onto another system that will be used to manage the hosts.

The Web Client is designed to manage multiple hosts from a single centralized interface and configuration database.
This simplifies and streamlines the management of the hosts as well as providing a single aggregation point.
This powerful enterprise level feature will give you a central configuration point for all your storage protection needs, a central scheduling point for all your maintenance tasks, a central monitoring point on all your storage devices health (i.e., network based SMART monitoring).

3. You can either choose to install using all the default options by clicking on the “Install” button or you can click on “Next” to view/edit the default options.

4. Installation type (default is recommended)

5. Destination folder

6. Program folder (default is recommended)

7. Desktop shortcut creation (default is recommended)

8. Review of selected options

9. Installation execution

10. Completed installation

Note to RAID-F users

If installing the tRAID Web Client Package on the same host as where you have RAID-F installed, you will need to change the port of either installation as they both use port 8080 by default.

To change the default ports used by either Web Client, you need to edit the Port.js file in your installation directory.
See the screenshot below for additional info (only the http and https ports apply to this topic).

Upgrading

Uninstalling

1. Prior to uninstalling, stop the Web UI service.
You can do that in your services management console or do it through the installation program menu as shown below (note that you must right-click and run the service stop script as administrator).

2.Wait 31 seconds or more for the stopped service to release all of its opened handles.

3. Uninstall through the Windows program uninstall applet in the control panel or through the program menu as shown below.